Digital video capabilities can be incorporated into a wide range of devices, including digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, wireless communication devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop computers, desktop computers, digital cameras, digital recording devices, cellular or satellite radio telephones and the like. Digital video devices can provide significant improvements over conventional analog video systems in efficiently creating, modifying, transmitting, storing, recording and playing motion video sequences.
Fine granularity scalability (FGS) generally refers to the ability to arbitrarily truncate a video bitstream to achieve graceful degradation of video quality within a given bit rate range. An FGS-encoded video bitstream includes a base layer of a specified quality, and one or more enhancement layers that are linked to the base layer. The enhancement layers include additional data to refine the quality of the base layer. As more of the FGS bitstream is received and decoded, via one or more enhancement layers, the quality of the decoded video improves.